Businesses and other entities are becoming increasingly dependent upon custom or semi-custom software applications to perform a variety of processing. For example, financial services businesses develop and utilize a wide range of applications to perform important activities, such as trade processing, decisioning, settlement, and the like. Each application may have different processing characteristics. For example, one application may be particularly dependent on database operations and may require use of a computing platform that has efficient memory and disk storage operation. Another application may be computation intensive, and require a computing platform that is suited for performing efficient floating point operations. As a result, different applications may perform differently on different hardware or computing platforms.
Advances in computing hardware and software are continuing at a rapid pace. This rapid advancement has provided a wide range of choices in computing platforms, with different operating systems, processors, storage devices, and memory configurations. A business or other entity may run custom or other software applications on a variety of computing platforms. Unfortunately, however, there is no “one size fits all” computing platform. An application requiring efficient floating point operations may not perform as well on a computing platform that is designed for efficient memory and disk storage applications. It is desirable to provide systems and methods to allow a business or other entity to select the computing platform (from among more than one available platforms) that is the best fit for a particular software application. It is desirable to provide systems and methods to match the processing requirements of applications to the performance results of one or more computing platforms to determine the best platform for an application. It is further desirable to monitor applications during operation and automatically generate application resource usage data for use in further matching each application to a most desirable computing platform.